KnitMe

You Must Have Been A Beautiful Baby...

I decided today I'd better get washing on the last hunk of raw fleece I have, three pounds of Cormo I got from here. So, I opened the box, and this is what came out. Meet Peggy. Or, Peggy's fleece, that is.

Isn't she gorgeous? And so clean - this is the cleanest, least stinky fleece I've laid hands on yet.

That little crimp is so distinct, it looks like corduroy. Peggy must be one beautiful girl. A pound or two is soaking in the washer right now.

In other fleecy news, I keep combing away at the grey rambouillet, whenever I have a few minutes.

This is not as much as it looks like because I'm not squishing it into the box - maybe 6 ounces of top? There's a bunch more combing ahead of me yet, but I'm really enjoying it. I know that a big reason a lot of people do this stuff is the thrill of knowing they are holding a garment they made right from the fleece. I like that idea, but I'm sort of immature I guess, unless I actually love the process, I won't do it, and I'm doing all this now because I've found I love it for itself!

I'm actually getting a little back-door color blending experience, because this fleece seems to contain white plus two shades of grey and I'm trying to blend them together. I'm still getting a variation of color between the pieces of top, but my intention is that the yarn will not be striped if I mix them together, more a varied grey.

In Other News, Pigs Fly

We have more content from the said-I-never-would department. As if it's not enough that in the past 4 months I have taken up fleece processing, for heaven's sake.

Not only have I shelled out for 10 balls of Silk Garden (swore I never would), I plan to design my own sweater out of it.

It's shade 37 and the picture does not do justice to the bewitching shades of violet and lavender with shots of jade and emerald. I bought 2 balls on sale to make a hat and by the time I was half done I was glassy-eyed and wondering if I remembered how to use Sweater Wizard. Luckily I was able to find a good price on it and didn't get into triple digits...

I envision a top-down raglan cardigan with a knitted-on lace border on sleeves and bottom edge, perhaps a lace collar, and a baby cable set off by garter stitch in lieu of a button band. I have to start right away before I lose my nerve...

Something else I swore I'd never do was work with that hairy bumpy lumpy sari silk yarn. You've seen the occasional WIP shot here lately, but this is the finished product.

I shaved it to death with my trimmer because it was so hairy (and the hairs seemed to be all yellow for some reason), which led to some of the more fragile sections of the yarn being accidentally severed, so this has a ton of hidden knots and mends. The nice thing is, you can't see them, it's such a wild surface already. It also shed like a Persian cat in August, so I spun it on air in the dryer a couple of times and although it still sheds it's much much better. It's surprisingly warm for something so fluid and drapey. I think I like it.

The colors were fun for someone who considers herself madly color-impaired. They just followed after one another with no rhyme, reason, or theoretical foundation. My favorite little passages were one where candy pink transitioned to daffodil yellow, and one where raspberry-wine transitioned to bright sky blue. That last one gave me another idea for a sweater... sheesh, where will this all lead??

Next thing you know I'll be learning to weave!

Small packages

Knitting time here has been scarce; since our move in December, I have managed two finished objects, small though they be!

Number 1:

This is a scarf I knit as part of a Christmas present for my brother, who is a freshman at Penn State. It was apparently very well-received, and he's asked for a "not-quite-matching" hat. See the "random" stripes? I am not one for randomness, so there really is a pattern: there are 5 big-stripe colors and 4 big-stripe thicknesses. So when I got up to 20 stripes, it would have repeated and become obvious. So I switched to a new stripe pattern. Can you guess which color I ran out of in this leftovers project?

The construction is a little bit interesting: the scarf is started as a double knit for a nice crisp edge, then knit in the round for the body of the scarf (using a jogless join technique), then bound off by a three-needle bind off for another crisp edge. I could have/perhaps should have used purl stitches to hide the jog and provide a natural fold point (I did this in my Harry Potter scarf, but thought it might have been superfluous)- perhaps next time.

Number 2:

Originally started for Little E, and finished in a frenzy this week as a gift for a dear friend's just-born with a crop of red hair. May I present my version of Oat Couture's Edwardian Carrying Cape?

I've also been working on the girly gansey from the just-finished Gansey Group/Workshop at ThreadBear. I'd like to have this be a 1st bday present for E, so I will hopefully finish by mid-April.

Also with a mid-April due date, a sweater for my sister's little-one-to-be. Here's a pic:

It's from Interweave Knits Winter 2004 (Diamond-Seed Baby Jacket) and I'm making it from some hand-dyed (by me), hand-spun (by me) fingering-weight yarn that's one ply of merino and one ply of silk. Most of the variegation is in the dye take-up in the silk. Anyhow, I am pretty happy with this endeavor.

My new and competing hobbies are tearing down wallpaper in the new house and chasing a crawling baby around. Since she has learned how to climb (onto boxes, low window ledges, etc.), she's needed closer supervision!

Our new house is an older one - we haven't quite pinned it down, but we think it is a Sears cube from the 19-teens? It's had a series of additions and remodels, however, so there's a lot going on - 40s wallpaper, 70s wallpaper, knotty pine and plywood panelling. Anyhow, nearly every wall (that is not knotty pine or plywood) has peeling and/or hideous wallpaper. I've started with the family room/kitchen, which had faded circa 1975 grasscloth wallpaper. The house is also quite drafty, so we've all had a good excuse to wear more handknits!

Dulaan Done

I did my Dulaan duty and my hats are ready to mail.

The one on the left is made in Galway, a sort of bluish forest or greenish teal or something like that. I blew the dust off my Knitters Handy Book of Knitting Patterns and made the one with the turned-up ribbing. The one on the right is a plain roll-brim hat made in Celtic Aran loosely based on a pattern from knitting.about.com. Both were out of stash and took less than 100 grams. To get an idea of how big they are, I tried them on Emily and they fit acceptably but a bit loosely so they are probably something like 4-8 year old size.

I have to admit this is the first time I've ever done a charity knitting project. (Once, something I made for a gift ended up a charity donation, but that's another story...) My reasons are a bit different from Sheila's, it has nothing to do with the expectation of failure and guilt. It is because probably the rarest and most precious commodity in my life right now is time, and I'm almost pathologically protective of every minute I don't spend working or tending to Emily. But, I really like Ryan (keeper of all information Dulaanish) and her Cuz, so I tried.

If you are at all inclined to charity knitting, drop over to Ryan's, she has everything you need to fire up some hats, blankets, etc. and get them to Mongolia in time for next winter.

What I Did On My Winter Vacation

Blessed with 4 days off between Job A and Job B (after not having had a vacation since last July), I had a chance to get my WIPs organized and play with some toys. This is going to be a long entry, be forewarned!

New WIP, the Wrixlan jacket from Jamiesons book 1. I'm using Soft Shetland in the shade 'amethyst' which may have been discontinued recently. It's a gorgeous shade of medium purple heathered with blues.

This is an EXHAUSTING knit - the first 64 rows are heavily cabled and some rows find me doing 50 or more twists on a single row. I knit two rows a day on this and it takes me more than half an hour and I'm sore when I finish. Luckily once I get the cabled part done it gets easier!

I put little crystal buttons on Saga Rose:

They're only 10mm and the only place I could find crystal buttons that small was jewelrysupply.com. They're in a shade called 'volcano' which is just perfect for Saga Rose because they seem to include rose, blue, and gold.

The sari silk triangle shawl proceeds, slowly because I can only knit on it when I don't mind shedding.

The Silk Garden moebius has consumed almost 2 balls of shade 205 and I'm going to need to break into my shade 211 to finish it. It's incredibly lightweight.

And the silk-from-hell pendant faroese shawl is still around and will probably never be done:

But all of that is only knitting. You're waiting to see what else I've been up to, I'm sure.

I read the chapter in Deb Menz's Color In Spinning about blending with combs, and I had to try blending something. So I went into the stash and grabbed a handful of royal blue ingeo and a handful of white shetland top, because they seemed to have similar staple lengths. I lashed them onto my 2 row combs as best I could and I combed. Eventually they sort of blended. They became this.

I'm not suggesting this is a particularly fabulous blend, but it was so much fun to just wing it. She says things like, "When you think they're blended enough, you're done." I want to do more of this, someday, when I don't feel color impaired!

Her description of how to use combs was not the main focus of the chapter, but it contained some information that amounted to a combing epiphany for me. It isn't that nobody has told me how to lash on or diz off before, but somehow they never said it exactly like she says it. Luckily I had new toys with which to try out my better understanding.

Indigo Hound 5 pitch English combs, which I snagged from the spinners' housecleaning pages.

She says that when you load a comb, you should not obsess about whether you can tell the cut end from the tip because it doesn't matter that much. Whoa. I don't have to worry about that? Yay! Let's go on! She says when you lash on, give a little tug or snap to be sure you've lashed on just a staple and you pull off what hasn't been properly lashed. That was just what I needed to hear to clear up my problems loading the combs. It almost amounts to a pre-comb because it clears up and aligns the fibers.

I set to work with this pound of grey rambouillet because it didn't wash up very nicely - after 4 scours and 3 rinses it still felt greasy, seemed dirty, had lots of vegetable matter, and parts of it seemed lumped together like pudding. How much harm could I do to it?

So I lashed and snapped and got the comb loaded.

Having tried them out the day before with the loaded comb upright and the moving comb going across, I decided to try the other way. Here's the loaded comb, turned sideways, with the moving comb combing downward.

When that pass is completed, you have to move the full comb sideways across the teeth of the stationary comb and comb the fleece back ono the stationary comb.

But I decided I had been happier when the stationary comb was pointing upward, so I turned it up and finished combing the fleece back onto it by moving the full comb down over the tines, alternating sides of the moving comb so the combing was not all in one direction.

For the third pass, I combed the way I'd started the day before, moving the empty comb back and forth across the fleece on the stationary comb.

After 3 passes, I had three piles of waste plus a comb containing fibers that were miraculously consistent, even, and soft.

Then I dizzed. My epiphany really paid off here. I thought for some reason that you hold the diz stationary and haul the fiber through it. Not so! Once you have the fiber coming through the diz, you pull fiber and diz TOGETHER toward you till you see the fibers about to let go of one another, then you push the diz back against the mass of the fibers on the comb and pull again. Magic!

Finally I had a nice little nest of really beautiful top, and one more teeny pile of waste.

I would NEVER have thought that messy fleece would make such a pretty top! I spindled it up along with a similar little top I'd made the day before, slightly greasy though it all was:

Then plyed it together:

And it became this!

Incredible. Guess I'll have to give this little pudding of a fleece some more respect!

Snippet of after-dinner conversation at our house tonight:

Emily, drawing: "This is a spebbo."
Mommy, looking: "What's a spebbo?"
Emily, explaining: "It's a kind of bix."

Ah.

Wood Sprite

My domino sampler in the previous post has become a hat! I have been meaning to try out domino knitting for a while, and decided that knitting up my sample yarns from the drumcarding class would be the perfect opportunity. I am calling it the "Wood Sprite Hat":

Vivian Hoxbro's book, "Domino Knitting" is concise but complete. I was able to make my way through 2 rows of dominos joined in the round, then found an odd ball of Rowan DDK in green that went with the drumcarded color blend. I knit open-topped triangles above and below the colored dominos, then a simple rolled stockinette edge and decreased top. I found I needed to pick up 2-3 extra sts in each triangle at the top and bottom or else it was too tight. This was definitely an exercise in "design by trial and error" - I think I started and tore out the top twice before I was happy with it!

I had a little bit of the multicolored yarn left so I made three "acorns" for the top using Vivian's instructions for "pompons."

Katie